Comments on: More On XPointer

By: Jeroen

Jeroen — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:27:35 +0000

Ah, sorry, I guess I didn’t close my link properly.

I’ve set up some tests.

#element(some_id/3) worked for me, but it’s possible that I forgot to upload my latest version.

Opera supports XPath, but string-range is not part of it, but added by XPointer, that’s why it doesn’t work. There’s no way I know of to add your own functions to the XPath evaluation context.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 22:22:54 +0000

Oh, one other thing – the user.js would need to be updated to support #element(some_id/3) = (the third child of the element with id=”foo”)

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 22:17:18 +0000

Thanks Jeroen – it works great! I had thought that Opera supported XPath in some way (or maybe that was XQuery). Anyway, I agree with you – the next step would be to get some greasemonkey action.

Btw, your Whatwg History link was broken (you didn’t fill in an href), so post that if you get a chance. Thanks!

By: Jeroen

Jeroen — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 16:25:47 +0000

You can get some XPointer support in Opera. I just wrote a userJS for the element and xmlns scheme (and a subset of the xpointer scheme). Adding support for the full xpointer scheme is harder, since you need some way to implement the string-range function. I don't really know a way to do that unless I try to parse the XPath myself (which is a lot of work). The script is also not tested in an XML context. It should work though (maybe with some changes). Examples that work: Whatwg History. Your element example. It's also not dynamic, although you could maybe do that using getters/setters. It's not that hard to port it to greasemonkey.

By: Jeff Schiller

Jeff Schiller — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 19:06:35 +0000

Follow-Up Question #1: How would XPointer work with documents that are updated dynamically? Is it complete chaos? Follow-Up Question #2: Wikipedia claims that XPointer is encumbered by a Sun Microsystems patent. Any truth to this? What are the ramifications?